Saturday quote: M87* slams. Discovering deep sleep. Proposal for building a digital cell

I love when researchers observe really strange particles, and this week scientists reported the observation of a particle that only has mass when moving in one direction. That’s enough! Ancient DNA analysis suggests that Neanderthals and Homo sapiens interbred for about 7,000 years. And a new paper characterized the timeless consciousness reported by people in deep meditative states. Further: Possible explanations for memory consolidation during sleep, massive explosions from famous photogenic black holes, and proposals to build matrices (in the case of single cells):

Investigation of the cerebral neocortex

Researchers from the Charité University of Berlin have published a paper in the journal Nature Communications presenting the results of a unique study that may provide answers to persistent mysteries about sleep and memory formation.

Researchers believe that during sleep, the hippocampus replays the day’s events stored in short-term memory and transfers them to long-term memory in the neocortex. Slow synchronous oscillations of voltage that occur during deep sleep control this process.

During these waves, the neuron’s voltage rises and falls synchronously once every second. Previous research has shown that artificially inducing these waves during sleep can improve memory, but brainwave technology can’t provide a detailed picture of what’s happening at the neuron level.

The researchers therefore studied extremely rare living neocortical samples taken from 45 patients undergoing surgical treatment for epilepsy or brain tumors. They used custom probes to simulate the voltage fluctuations typical of slow-wave sleep and found that synaptic connections between individual neurons strengthened immediately after the voltage was increased from low to high. did.

“During that short window of time, you can think of the cortex as being in a primed state. When the brain replays a memory during this exact time, it is particularly effectively transferred to long-term memory. It’s very slow. Waveform sleep seems to support memory formation by making the neocortex particularly receptive for short periods of time,” said Franz Xaver Mittermeier, lead author of the study. says.

enthusiastic object

M87* is a supermassive black hole in the galaxy Messier 87, famously the first black hole photographed by paparazzi on Earth during the Event Horizon Telescope project.

Now, the EHT Multiwavelength Working Group has announced the first observations of high-energy gamma-ray flares from this relativistic object, based on the galaxy’s near-simultaneous spectra across the widest wavelength range collected to date. In particular, this jet was huge, lasting almost three days and exceeding the size of the black hole’s event horizon by tens of millions of times.

“This is the first gamma-ray flare event observed at this source in more than a decade, and allows us to precisely constrain the size of the region responsible for the observed gamma-ray emissions.” –Recent observations, both using the more sensitive EHT array, and these efforts planned for the next few years provide valuable insights and great opportunities to study the physics surrounding M87’s supermassive black hole. These efforts will provide discs. “We promise to shed light on the relationship between jets and elucidate the origins and mechanisms behind the emission of gamma-ray photons,” says Giacomo Principe, a researcher at the University of Trieste.

Unicellular Neo’s Confinement Proposal

A joint research team comprised of Stanford University, Genentech, and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative says cell biology and artificial intelligence have advanced enough that the creation of a single virtual cell is feasible. . Accurate digital models of human cells will provide information about new properties of complex intracellular interactions and functions, creating an avenue for in silico experiments that can potentially replace in vivo experiments.

Although AI currently provides the tools underlying such large-scale, dynamic systems, the complexity of a single cell cannot be underestimated. This collaboration calls for collaboration across genetics, proteomics, medical imaging, computer science, and stakeholders including academia, non-profit organizations, and industry.

“This is a gigantic project comparable to the Genome Project, requiring collaboration across disciplines, industries and countries, and it could take more than a decade before a fully functional model is available. “We understand that,” says Emma Lundberg, associate professor of bioengineering and graduate school. Pathology at Stanford University’s School of Engineering and Medicine.

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